Olympians bring their zeal for fitness, competition to Los Angeles County schools

Former Olympic swimmer Rada Owen taught a physical education class Thursday at Westport Heights Elementary in Westchester on Thursday, November 21, 2013. The visit was one of 50 in Los Angeles County organized by the non-profit group Ready, Set, Gold. Owen gets high-fives after class. (Robert Casillas / Staff Photographer)

For students at Westport Heights Elementary in Westchester, physical education is usually led by their classroom teacher. But on Thursday, the fifth-graders went out on the blacktop and were greeted by an Olympic athlete.

Standing 5-foot-11 and looking upbeat, swimmer Rada Owen — renowned for a flawless technique that has been widely analyzed and imitated — shared a confession about those intense moments leading up to the starting beep.

“Sometimes I’d start to get really nervous,” Owen told the class. “I’d think, ‘These girls are really fast. They’re going to beat me.’ And you know what? They did. But if I said, ‘Pishhh. I’m going to beat these girls,’ guess what: I did. You’ve got to believe in yourself.”

Owen is among about 50 Olympians who serve as kind of surrogate P.E. coaches for as many schools in Los Angeles County.

At the 50 schools — a handful of which are in the South Bay — a world-class athlete leads a class five or six times a year.

The idea is to use the clout of these quasi-celebrities to get kids excited about exercise, and, in so doing, combat the recent rise in childhood obesity. When the effort was launched in 2006, a person could have been forgiven for assuming it was at least partly a PR stunt.

Organized by a nonprofit called “Ready, Set, Gold,” the annual program is a remnant of L.A.’s unsuccessful bid in 2006 to host the 2016 Olympics. The Summer Games that year will be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“Ready, Set, Gold” was a key part of L.A.’s proposal.

Bernadine Bednarz, the organization’s director, said it is the only program of its kind in the United States.

London formed a similar program in its successful gambit for the 2012 Summer Games, but Bednarz said her firsthand visit to observe it left her underwhelmed.

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“They don’t have a strong program at all,” she said. “It was very slap dash.”

It should be said that Los Angeles enjoys a distinct advantage. “Ready, Set, Gold” affiliates like to say that Southern California is home to more Olympians that any region in the world. The metro area is so rich with Olympians that the program is able to pair many schools with athletes who live in the neighborhood.

Such is the case with the 35-year-old Owen, who swam in the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and lives a few blocks away from the Westchester school.

Some of the athletes have deep connections to their assigned schools. Lashinda Demus, a track-and-field superstar who has competed in the 2004 and 2012 Olympics and is training for the 2016 Games, works with students in the K-12 Foshay Learning Center, the downtown L.A.-area school where her father attended.

Paul Gonzalez, a gold medalist boxer from the 1984 Olympics, teaches P.E. at Roosevelt High School, his alma mater in the East Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up.

“The kids kind of look up to them — here are these guys who had the same childhood we did and became Olympic athletes,” Bednarz said. “It increases hope, or opens their eyes to the possibilities.”

The oldest Olympian of the group is Chuck Nelson, 82, a member of the 1964 Olympic volleyball team — even though his alma mater, the University of Nebraska, didn’t have a volleyball team.

Nelson, who became a certified public accountant, leads P.E. instruction at Loyola Village Elementary in Westchester.

Also working with students in the South Bay are cyclist Adam Duvendeck at Denker Avenue Elementary in Gardena, canoeing star Cathy Marino at Carson High and track-and-field athlete Barbara Edmonson at Narbonne High.

The program, which used to subsist on private donations, went out of commission for a year and a half, but it was revived in 2010 by Samsung, the primary sponsor.

Although the overarching goal is to help form lifelong habits, the more tangible aim is to prepare students for the annual physical fitness testing that all fifth-, seventh- and ninth-graders take in California.

On Thursday, Owen taught students the proper technique on several exercises on which students will be tested, such as push-ups and stretches. She also dispensed some dietary advice, encouraging them to cut down on soda.

“I’m not here to say you can’t ever eat that bad stuff or drink that bad stuff,” she said. “I still drink a soda every now and then. I still have chips every now and then, and cookies. And that’s OK, as long as it’s not a big staple of your diet.”